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SOCIAL THOUGHT & COMMENTARY

“Picture-Thinking”: Sovereignty and Citizenship in Bangladesh

Nusrat S. Chowdhury, Amherst College

ABSTRACT

This article offers insights into the classic impasse of citizenship and sov-

ereignty in post-colonial South Asia. It focuses on two public texts, a na-

tional identification card and a censored photograph, both generated dur-

ing a state of emergency in Bangladesh, from 2007-2008. By “impasse,”

I point to the ideological loop that paternalistic authority resorts to in the

name of governance, where a repressive, corrupt, and/or un-democratic

governmental apparatus is blamed for the underdeveloped political ratio-

nality of its citizens. For the very same reason, sovereignty as domination

is justified in order to protect these masses from their own unruly nature,

that is, from becoming members of crowds as opposed to proper citizens.

Examining the humor surrounding the electronic circulation of an identifi-

cation document, amidst attempts to roll out a national ID card during the

Emergency, I draw attention to the limits of the non-ancestral mode of po-

litical power that attempted to interpellate a new kind of citizen. My analy-

sis of a photograph, that was later censored, of a man kicking an official

in military uniform suggests that the crowd forms the always-threatening

backdrop against which a range of individual and collective identities of

the citizen are articulated. On an analytical level, I develop a theory of

“picture-thinking” as a key function of sovereignty. I take the formula-

tion from William Mazzarella who, following G. W. F. Hegel and Gustave

Le Bon, historicizes the purported opposition between so-called rational

Anthropological Quarterly, Vol. 87, No. 4, p. 1257-1278, ISSN 0003-5491. © 2014 by the Institute for Ethnographic Research (IFER) a part of the George Washington University. All rights reserved.


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citizens and affective crowds. Ultimately, I argue that the post-colonial

sovereign, quick to blame the crowds for “picture-thinking,” more often

than not, partakes of this very act. [Keywords: Citizenship, crowds, politi-

cal emergency, democracy, visual culture, Bangladesh, South Asia]

A crowd thinks in images, and the image itself immediately calls up

a series of other images, having no logical connection with the first.

—Gustave Le Bon (2002 [1896]:15)

In February 2007, precisely a month after the declaration of a national

state of emergency in Bangladesh, Muhammad Yunus—the Nobel-

winning “guru of micro credit”—wrote a letter to its citizens. It was pub-

lished on the same day as headlines in major vernacular and English dai-

lies, and articulated the desire of the 2006 Peace Prize winner to join

national politics. In the intimate register of a personal letter, addressed to

an individual, yet generalized citizen (“prio nagorik”—Dear Citizen), Yunus

sought popular opinion on his political aspiration in the form of letters

and text messages (as cited in bdnews24.com 2007a). Two more letters

followed in which he expressed enthusiasm and consequent disenchant-

ment with the idea of running for office. Yunus’s correspondence with the

nation began at a time when more familiar modes of political communi-

cation, such as meetings, protests, and congregations were illegal. He

eventually decided against floating a new political party. Yet, the letters

remain symptoms of a moment of conjuncture in Bangladeshi national

life in which technocratic governance—with its promise of transparency,

immediacy, and honesty—seemed to have finally left behind a much-ma-

ligned plebian political culture.

In this Social Thought & Commentary piece, I explore the classic im-

passe of citizenship and sovereignty in post-colonial South Asia by ana-

lyzing the visual culture of this political episode. By “impasse,” I point to

the ideological loop that paternalistic authority—both colonial and nation-

alist—has historically resorted to in the name of governance. Whether in

the case of Nehruvian developmental politics, the debates on censorship

across South Asia, or the withholding of democratic rights for the sake of

democracy in the Bangladesh Emergency (Chakrabarty 2007, Mazzarella

2013, Mohaieman 2014, Wasif 2009), a circular logic of governance has

NUSRAT S. CHOWDHURY

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been at work. In this logic, a repressive, corrupt, and/or un-democratic

governmental apparatus is blamed for the underdeveloped political ratio-

nality of its citizens. For the very same reason, sovereignty as domination

continues to be justified in order to protect the masses from their own

unruly nature, that is, one could say, from becoming members of crowds

as opposed to proper citizens. As we shall see, maintaining the border

between the two became particularly untenable and all the more neces-

sary for the purposes of governance during the Emergency.

Calling it a coup “that dare not speak its name,” The Economist had

this to say about the Emergency: “The army, in the tradition of ‘guardian

coups’ from Fiji to Thailand, has stepped in with the usual list of apparent-

ly noble goals. The interim government it is backing will enable credible

elections, clean up the country’s extremely politicised civil service, fight

corruption, fix the country’s power crisis and keep food prices in check—

and then return to the barracks” (The Economist 2007). The Bangladesh

army’s version resonates with the official story of a similar political mo-

ment under Indira Gandhi in neighboring India three decades earlier (Tarlo

2003).This time, there was one crucial difference: at a first glance, as the

BBC rightly noted, the general public in Bangladesh seemed content to

be under Emergency rule (Mustafa 2007). Even liberal democrats, The

Economist added, cheered on the new government for imprisoning in-

cumbent politicians and state functionaries with ruthless precision, ad-

dressing long-standing grievances against the corruption and criminal-

ization of public life.

This two-year period, I argue, can be read as a unique background

against which a circular logic of governance unfolded in the most the-

atrical manner. In doing so, this ethnographic context can illuminate the

status of everyday politics and political sovereignty in contemporary

Bangladesh. As points of illustration I have chosen two forms of media:

a national photo identification card, also considered a voter ID card, that

was issued for the first time during the Emergency, and a photograph that

was censored around the same time. When read against the backdrop of

Yunus’s letters, they reveal what I have described here as the classic im-

passe of post-colonial sovereignty (Chakrabarty 2007, Mazzarella 2013).

The ID card is of a citizen of Bangladesh. It has been circulating on

Facebook, the social networking site, as a parody of the national photo-

ID. The photograph features a scene of a civilian assault on a uniformed

solider. The card was introduced to accomplish the long-overdue task of


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making a proper list of legitimate voters and their identification, thereby

curbing electoral fraud. The photo in question was considered unsuitable

for national consumption for its alleged damaging impact on the public

image of the military, which backed the Emergency government. It was

censored in national media soon after publication.

On an analytical level, I develop a theory of “picture-thinking” as a key

function of sovereignty. I take the formulation from William Mazzarella

(2010) who, echoing Hegel (1998) and Le Bon (1960), historicizes the op-

position between reason and affect that informed classic crowd theory as

well as more recent ruminations on political collectivity. In this theoretical

trajectory, the crowd appears to haunt the modern fiction of democratic

citizenship (Ortega y Gasset 1932). Mazzarella explains,

Hegel, in the Phenomenology of Spirit, states quite explicitly that

the condition of progress toward autonomy of reason is a willing-

ness to let the naively concrete attachments of “picture-thinking”

(1998[1807]:64) be penetrated and surpassed (sublated) by the

strain of conceptual thought. And it is precisely a slide back into

the chaos of picture-thinking that defines the crowd…But it is also

worth noting that, within this discourse, thinking in pictures also

means thinking with the body. (2010:9)

More recently, James Scott (1998) has made us attentive to another

kind of “picture-thinking” that is at the core of modern state power as

it aims to individualize, identify, and govern. Studying an ethnographic

instantiation of this seeming opposition between an autonomous subject

and affective crowds, and by further exploring the analytical possibilities

of the term “picture-thinking,” I argue that the sovereign, quick to blame

the crowds for picture-thinking as characterized in Le Bon’s quote at the

beginning of this article, more often than not partakes of this very act. I

come to this understanding by examining the dialectic between citizens

and crowds as played out in the juxtaposition of the two visual texts. To

read these in relation to the other texts whose public circulation was of-

ficially sponsored or encouraged, such as Yunus’s letters, is to point to

the failure of an individuating mode of identification that is both historical

and foundational. An ID card, for Scott, is a quintessential example, and

it is to this topic I first turn.

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Kasu Mia’s Joke

It all started on January 11, 2007, when the president dissolved the parlia-

ment, initiating an official state of emergency that lasted until December

2008. This was hardly the first declared emergency for Bangladesh. The

first president of the newly born nation had invoked emergency laws on

December 28, 1974, a mere three years after independence. The political

oppression and the suppression of rights in this period reached a height

that was thought to have precedence only in the actions of the Pakistani

Armed Forces in the nine-month war that led to the independence of

Bangladesh from what is commonly perceived as a quasi-colonial rela-

tionship between the two wings of Pakistan (Umar 1980). With the as-

sassination of the first president in 1975, the country began a period of

military rule that lasted, with minor exceptions, about 15 years. The recur-

rence of a state of emergency in 2007-2008, however, was unique even to

this political mise-en-scène where multiple coups took place and martial

laws were instituted in regular intervals since independence (Muhammad

2008, Wasif 2009). The reasons have partly to do with the Emergency’s

spectacular and unforeseen anti-corruption agenda, as well as the com-

municative strategies through which it made its presence felt.

For the most part, the official view that this “interruption” of the demo-

cratic process could, in fact, cleanse national politics of at least some

of its corrupt, kin-dependent, semi-feudal afflictions found wider reso-

nance. With the two former heads of state in jail and most of their political

and business allies in hiding, exile, or prison, the rhetoric of change—for

a change—did not sound predictably hollow. The first-ever decision to

issue national identification cards for the much-anticipated elections was

hailed as a necessary move in the right direction. The massive logistical

enterprise of taking photos and entering the biographical information of

citizens was outsourced to the military. This ambitious plan could change

the way electoral battles were fought and criminals were chased, a major

news source declared within a week of the publication of Yunus’s first let-

ter (bdnews24.com 2007b). The card to be issued for voter identification

was also to serve as a photo ID, a previously non-existent state document

in a country about 40 years old. The emancipatory and democratic pos-

sibilities afforded by the ID card were comparable to the aura of the trans-

parent ballot boxes also to be introduced for the first time in the national

elections. The visual economy within which a drive to transparency took

place was mediated by a sense of being looked at from afar. From foreign


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governments and international donor agencies to transnational media,

to echo Rosalind Morris on Thailand, “[t]he demand for transparency is

thought to compel the performance of a certain honesty, and this honesty

(or at least its performance), is thought to secure the possibility of smooth

exchange relations in turn” (2004:226). The following comment from a

reader of an English-language daily highlights a representative sentiment:

Ironically, as Bangladeshis we do not have any identity to prove who

we are. It is even incomprehensible by many foreigners that how a citi-

zen of a country does not have any legal means of proving his/her citi-

zenship. There is no birth certificate or social security number for the

common people… Most important of all is the creation of public trust

in a national identity system…[T]rust is also achieved when an identity

system is reliable and stable, and operates in conditions that provide

genuine value and benefit to the individual [sic]. (Ferdous 2007)

Still, performances of transparency signaled the possibility of secrets

elsewhere, and trust seemed particularly elusive at a time of grand expec-

tations and greater suspicions. Anxieties persisted around the potential

success of a timely gathering of the requisite data for the elections to take

place at all. In a densely-populated country with inadequate infrastructure,

the possibility of success was understandably far-fetched. Some won-

dered if it was another ploy to thwart the elections. Theories, conspirato-

rial and otherwise, were also advanced with an aim to unveil the political

schema lurking behind the smokescreen of democratic reform. Others

saw this consolidation of a graphic regime of surveillance as one of the

state’s first steps toward fascism (Ahmed and Alam 2013).

As was expected, the tiny piece of plastic and the process of procuring it

generated an equal amount of excitement and disillusionment. Confusion

as to the proper function of the card in the everyday bureaucratic life of

the citizen straddled the boundaries of desire and despair. One man at a

voting center was optimistic: “I don’t care what you all say, I’m not losing

my National ID, I will get to America with this card” (Mohaiemen 2008). The

confusion surrounding the card was further compounded by a technical

glitch: the photographs that most cards finally displayed nearly failed to

serve their purpose of state recognition. Western readers would find un-

canny similarities between these ID photos and those surreal, distorted,

and comic representations that are magic mirror reflections.

NUSRAT S. CHOWDHURY

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A letter to the editor sums up the exasperation of a newly registered

voter:

I was awfully shocked when I received my national ID card…Those

who came to collect their respective National ID card were flabber-

gasted to see their photographs. They could not, like me, recognise

their own pictures. Not a single person was satisfied with the distort-

ed photograph in the identity card…The photograph in the identity

card is neither colour nor black and white. It is simply an irritating and

confusing picture. (The Daily Star 2008, emphasis added)

The pictorial distortions disturb the classic mode of state picture-think-

ing that is an ID card, thus throwing the aspiring citizen back into a crowd.

The technical problems of a newly introduced computerized data entry

system disrupt the way in which an ID photo seeks eye-to-eye interpella-

tion, as it were, by its straight-on framing of the person. The “irritation” of

the letter writer is partly related to the inability of the citizen to become part

of this massive project of transparency and hence a part of Bangladesh’s

political modernity. The irritation and confusion are precisely because one

finds oneself unrecognizable—to the state and to oneself—and is there-

fore relegated once more to the primitive crowd.1

The state’s failure to engage its citizens in mutual recognition, moreover,

exceeded the technical glitches in the logistics of taking photographs. I ar-

gue that the misrecognition bespeaks a deeper failure of identification that

haunts most state projects of enu-

meration (Scott 1998). Let me offer

a photo of an ID card of Kasu Mia,

a citizen of Bangladesh, to explain

what I mean.

According to the information on

the card (Figure 1), Kasu Mia was

born on January 1, 1962. As is typi-

cal of the format of the temporary

card given to newly registered vot-

ers, it features a photo of its owner

on the left with his signature on the

bottom. The list of requisite information includes the name of the individual

in both Bengali and English, as well as both of his parents’ names. In the

Figure 1: This image of a photo-ID has

been circulating on the Internet as a joke.


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photo, the 13-digit ID number in bold that appears at the bottom of the

picture is displayed in English. The signature of the officer issuing the card

is partially seen on the right side, while the words “Jatiya Parichay Patra”—

National ID Card—are barely visible at the top.

At the outset, what is funny about the card is its failed efficacy. Kasu

Mia’s father is identified not by his proper name, but rather by the kin rela-

tion by which he is very likely to be addressed in his family: he is “mrito

Babur baap”—the father of his deceased son, Babu. Nor is Kasu Mia’s

mother listed by her actual name; she is simply “Nayeber Maa”—the moth-

er of Nayeb, who, we presume, is a male sibling of Kasu Mia, the owner

of the ID card in question. An Althusserian drama of hailing by which a

citizen is interpellated, thus, comically fails (Althusser 2001). It fails simply

because, in this case, the state confronts a kinship idiom that flies in the

face of its bureaucratic rationality—the enumerating and individuating im-

petus of a national identification system. Whether or not this is an actual

ID card of a regular citizen or a deliberately modified one is not clear from

the conversations around the image. However, the fact that there is a joke

to be made is adequate justification for the analysis I offer here.

The naming practices of the state, James Scott and others have argued,

require a synoptic view, “a standardized scheme of identification gener-

ating mutually exclusive and exhaustive designations” (Scott, Tehranian,

and Mathias 2002:5). The creation of a legal, fixed patronym shares long

intimacy with the modern project of state building. Rural or working-class

Muslim Bengalis such as Kasu Mia often partake of vernacular naming

practices that are non-hereditary and context specific. In the larger South

Asian context, Mian, among other things, is a last name for Muslim nobil-

ity. Its vernacular derivative, Mia, in contemporary Bangladesh, functions

as a form of address for any adult Muslim male, either honorific or deroga-

tory. The generic nature of Kasu Mia’s last name adds to the little drama of

misrecognition enacted in his ID card.

An ID card, a mark of the individual citizen bearing rights accorded by

the nation-state, is a seemingly innocent and powerful repository of politi-

cal value in the context of Bangladesh’s attempted democratic reforms.

When in circulation, Kasu Mia’s card condenses a number of cultural

mores supposedly characteristic of a nation and its people held respon-

sible for the failure of democracy (cf. Farquhar 2009). The card has been

a joke circulated by some members of Facebook, the principal medium

through which this particular state document generated conversations

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and laughter. Some felt the need to clarify that the object of their laughter

was not the hapless citizen Kasu Mia. Instead, it was the state that has be-

come the butt of the joke with regard to this play of, or play on citizenship.

Many of the buzzwords of our time, from transparency to accountability,

are in practical terms calls to documentation. Ethnographers routinely feel

what Annalise Riles (2006) calls the “pull” of documents, yet they also de-

spise these artifacts as sources of ethnographic knowledge. For Matthew

Hull (2012), this is partly because we produce and use documents in much

the way the people we study do. To study documents, then, says Riles, is

by definition to study how ethnographers themselves know: the document

is at once an ethnographic object, an analytical category, and a method-

ological orientation (2006:7). Their material qualities inflect the character

of communicative practice. Exploring the formal qualities of documents,

while tracing “paper trails” (Chu 2010) and exposing “paper truths” (Tarlo

2003), anthropology helps in rethinking their instrumental or informational

purposes. By treating governance as material practice, it approaches doc-

uments and similar textual objects in circulation that make up what Hull

(2008) calls the material dimensions of bureaucratic semiotic technologies.

Documents have the potential to discharge affective energies which are felt

and experienced by people to the point of acquiring fetishistic qualities,

where certain kinds of potency are assumed to emanate from their very

materiality (Gordillo 2006, Navaro-Yashin 2007). Such bureaucratic tech-

niques, of which an ID card is an ur-example, are the means by which the

state governs its populace.

Yet, ethnographic examples abound where illegibility and opacity are

created by the very instruments of legibility. “Legibility,” Veena Das (2006)

explains as she expands on James Scott’s (1998) famous formulation,

“seeing like a state,” surfaces as an operative theme in the analysis of rou-

tine practices of the state because so much of the way we experience the

modern state is constructed through its writing practices. Ethnographic

approaches in studying the state’s documentary and statistics-gathering

initiatives, however, make evident the inherent illegibility—the failure to

“read” on the part of both the state and its subjects—of governmental

practices, documents, and words (Das and Poole 2004).

Das and Poole explain:

In defining the state as that which replaces private vengeance with

the rule of law, Weber was, of course, building on earlier traditions


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of Kant and Hegel, for whom the state in modernity was defined by

clear-cut boundaries between the external realm of law and the in-

ternal realm of ethics and also between the realm of universalistic

reason proper to the state and primordial relations proper to the fam-

ily. Inherent in this imagination of the figure of law was the creation of

boundaries between those practices and spaces that were seen to

form part of the state and those that were excluded from it. (2004:7)

Kasu Mia’s ID card is a case in point. It offers itself as a fecund site where

assumptions about the security of identity and rights become unsettled.

One can venture from the name and the parental identification—or non-

identification, rather—of Kasu Mia that he is a citizen of rural or working

class origin. Though he is very much a card-carrying citizen, his identifica-

tion document nonetheless fails to effectively mediate an idealized citizen-

ship as envisioned in the letters through which Yunus addressed the na-

tion. The NGO charisma that Yunus aspired to capitalize for his entry into

politics was framed in light of the disjuncture between the citizen of law

and the infantile citizen of the likes of Kasu Mia (cf. Berlant 1997). NGOs,

of course, operate on a similar paternalistic logic—as did the progressive

developmentalism of the Emergency—which retards democratic politics

all the while claiming to usher them in. The infantile citizen is still behold-

en to the affective relations of kinship that dismantle the public–private

divide so precious to the fiction of modern liberal democracy. Universal

citizenship meant, as Scott, Tehranian, and Mathias argue, “that a citizen

[could] be uniquely and reliably distinguishable as an individual and not as

a member of a community, manor, guild, or parish” (2002:16, emphasis in

original). The new subject/citizen envisioned in the emancipatory ideal of

the French Revolution was an abstract, unmarked individual who was the

bearer of equal rights before the law (Scott, Tehranian, and Mathias 2002).

In Bangladesh, the fact that this supposed divide has been flouted in

the most theatrical and predictable fashion in national politics adds certain

poignancy to Kasu Mia’s own brand of defiance; in other words, his resis-

tance to recognition. A dynastic political culture has thrived by mobilizing

kin-terms, most popularly jatir janak (“father of the nation”), being ascribed

to Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, the first president. Powerful politicians here

are known for exploiting kin ties to further their careers. Sheikh Hasina and

Khaleda Zia, both heads of state at one point, are, respectively, the daugh-

ter and wife of two former presidents. The lateral entry of their progeny

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into party politics (their sons have officially joined the ancestral parties)

has only signaled the continuation of a well-established pan-South Asian

trend. Muhammad Yunus offered himself as a glorious exception to this

soap opera of national politics. It is Kasu Mia who brings to us, albeit

humorously, the failure of that exception that Yunus attempted to exploit.

Kasu Mia’s ID is a symptom of the failure of state modernity. It also elic-

its a barely disavowed discomfort shared by consumers of digital media

over the feudalism at the heart of national politics. Kasu Mia’s naiveté, if

one could call it that, is the source of the comic effect that his ID card has

for a middle-class public whose Facebook walls abound in emoticons,

iconic representations of the gesture of laughter at his citizenship. Freud

(2003) has already pointed out that the type of comic which stands near-

est to jokes is the naïve. He explains: “An inhibitory expenditure which

we usually make suddenly becomes unutilizable owing to our hearing the

naïve remark, and it is discharged by laughter” (Freud 2003:226). The state

is the joke. No doubt. Yet, there is more to this laughter. The working-class,

under-educated, and seemingly naïve citizen fails to perform an idealized

citizenship while being subjected to state scrutiny. After all, a veritable

index of identification, the photograph—devoid of the otherwise irritating

distortions—is still imprinted on the card.2

Is one laughing at Kasu Mia’s stupidity, then? Partially, at least, it seems.

Stupidity, at least in ancient Greece, was seen as remaining outside the

domain of the political. “The idiot is the one who is not a citizen,” Avital

Ronell (2002:41) tells us. And yet, when stupidity asserts itself without

remorse, it paradoxically plays on the side of truth. Stupidity, in Ronell’s

reading, remains a phantom of the truth to which it points. And even after

asserting that “in crowds it is stupidity and not mother-wit that is accu-

mulated,” Le Bon goes on to credit them with deep social truths (2002

[1896]:6). Not unlike the Idiot in Dostoevsky’s novel, Kasu Mia exposes

the disorder and interruption that constitute the social milieu but normally

remain masked (Ronell 2002).

But we must be laughing at ourselves too, we the citizens, when we

laugh at—not with, mind you—Kasu Mia, or for that matter, the state.

Being at once native (a co-citizen) and foreign (keeping what Ronell [2002]

describes as an “inextinguishable appeal” of the stranger and evoking

a forgotten aura), our idiot evokes laughter in his fellow nationals who

align themselves, if only momentarily, with the Idiot as the “we” of a ner-

vous modernity. Ronell’s reference to modernity is a nod to the defining


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relationship of identity and modernity. The latter is associated with the

ability to “achieve” an identity as opposed to being always defined by

identity given by birth (Siegel 1997). For the members of Facebook, the

desire to clarify that they were not laughing at Kasu Mia implies that they

felt the joke was uncomfortably close to mere classist derision. One can

only have an ID if one is a modern citizen, and it is preposterous to think

the poor could be that. In a cultural context where it is still absurd to imag-

ine a poor person having an ID card, it could only be read as Kasu Mia’s.

Freud is once more useful in pointing out the contiguity of the sublime

and the ordinary as a source of comedy:

When an unfamiliar thing that is hard to take in, a thing that is abstract

and in fact sublime in an intellectual sense, is alleged to tally with

something familiar and inferior, in imagining which there is a complete

absence of any expenditure on abstraction, then that abstract thing is

itself unmasked as something equally inferior. (2003:261)

What, after all, could be more sublime than the idea of the modern

state?3 If Kasu Mia’s ID card, the abject underside of a fetishized docu-

ment, makes us laugh at the everyday, worldly affairs of the sublime state

(cf. Navaro-Yashin 2007), then the laughter that it produces is at least par-

tially one of irony. It was the Emergency that forced a nation to observe

from an ironic distance when the idea of citizenship repeatedly came un-

der violent attacks—both symbolic and otherwise—from the state itself;

that, too, through its myriad technologies of citizenship. Yunus’s letters,

one must add, remained eerily silent on the topic.

Kasu Mia’s story is tragicomic. The impersonal yet individuating effect

of an ID card—its I/you mode of interpellation—is challenged by collec-

tive kin-relations passing for parental identification. Kasu Mia, at this mo-

ment of Althusserian proportions, is more a member of a generic crowd—

Ortega y Gasset’s “mass man” (1932)—than an individually identifiable

citizen. The generic density of kin terms in the ID card, equally impersonal

because relatively unlocatable, though no less intimate than the second-

person singular of Yunus’s letters, protects Kasu Mia, if only in an incom-

plete fashion and possibly even without a conscious effort on his part.

In the absence of a furtive Geertzian wink or an insider’s joke shared be-

tween Kasu Mia and his fellow citizens, the laughter is an attempt to come

to terms with Kasu Mia’s citizenship, his subjection and ours that can only

NUSRAT S. CHOWDHURY

1269

be partial. Using this failure as a metonym, we might speculate, in a more

culturally grounded way, the failure of the project of the Emergency.

The Kick and the Crowd

That the military government’s mantra of “politics without politicization”

failed to effectively mesmerize a national audience was made further ap-

parent by the events in the coming months. This time the disenchantment

with the regime came from the youth, widely thought to be a core constitu-

ency for the political vision that Muhammad Yunus had nurtured. A stu-

dent protest movement that had started at the University of Dhaka over a

skirmish between students and soldiers on campus sparked the most po-

tent resistance against the regime. Three days of turmoil that turned into a

riot reverberated beyond the capital, bringing charges against professors

and students of public universities which resulted in their imprisonment.

If a single image could capture the public sentiment against the

Emergency government, then, as the BBC wrote with unmistakable relish,

it is the one of “a sandaled demonstrator in mid-air kick and a hatless army

officer in terrified retreat” (Sudworth 2007). The photograph (see Figure 2)

was soon censored in Bangladeshi

media. The BBC article that carried

it announced: “[The photo’s] pub-

lication was seen as a humiliation,

every bit as great as if that flying

sandaled foot had been aimed at

the behind of the army chief him-

self” (Sudworth 2007). The photo

resists the attempt at enumeration

and control not simply by featuring

an unruly citizen. On an analytical

level, the photograph mocks state

identification by indexing what I

would call a logic of crowd rather

than a logic of citizenship.

But first, a brief chronology: Between August 20th and 22nd, 2007,

violence spread across university campuses nationwide. It started with

an incident at a soccer match at the University of Dhaka campus. A ver-

bal back-and-forth between angry students and army soldiers (who had

Figure 2: This photo of a civilian assault

on a soldier was censored in the

Bangladeshi press.

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been camping at the University gymnasium for some time) turned into a

physical fight. Most of the 200 people injured were students. One was

reported dead in the protests against military presence on campus. The

government imposed a week-long curfew to quell public unrest. Four

professors at the Universities of Dhaka and Rajshahi, the latter located in

the northwest region of the country, were detained along with 24 students

for breaking Emergency rules which outlawed protests and gatherings

(BBC News 2007).

The ban on this photo and the publication of another featuring the pub-

lic apology that one of the incarcerated professors offered later at the

court premises has since been analyzed in a Bengali essay titled, “Unruly

Images: Masculinity, Public Memory, and Censorship” (Ahmed 2008, my

translation). The cover of Rahnuma Ahmed’s essay, published as a book-

let halfway through military rule, is an eloquent challenge to severe state

measures of censorship. It features the photograph of the academic under

arrest speaking to a set of microphones before him. Below it is a rectan-

gular space of the same size that was originally intended for the censored

image. The word, CENSORED, in caps, stands in for the absent photo.

Both images are embedded in a background of blurred out newspaper

print. Ahmed compares the forbidden photographs of American soldiers

wounded or dead in Iraq with the censored photo from Bangladesh, fram-

ing her argument around the symbolic emasculation of the military medi-

ated by the images that were later censored. As Ahmed argues, in order

for the state to domesticate the effects of the “unruly” photograph, it be-

comes important—in fact necessary—to publicize the photograph of the

apology. Since the two images are linked to each other in a cause-and-ef-

fect relationship, despite the desire to salvage the seeming omnipotence

of the military, the published photograph works as a mnemonic cue for the

absent photo, which allegedly compromised the military’s image.

Ahmed is of course right in reading into the photograph a dense politics

of masculinity. The reference to the military uniform in the apology that one

of the professors under arrest had read aloud to the nation turned a civil-

ian’s kick into a metonym for the disgrace of the institution of the military.

I agree with Ahmed that the discourse of humiliation brings the semiotics

of a masculine corporeal aesthetic to the fore. The “hatlessness” of the

soldier, I would add, is surely one crucial aspect of this perceived emas-

culation. Her point about the photo of the public apology serving as an

index for the censored one is equally well-taken. In light of the argument

NUSRAT S. CHOWDHURY

1271

of this essay, however, I take a rather different tack: I want to read this

photograph as a public document that resists the individuating attempts

proffered in the ID card. It captures a moment of resistance to the state’s

hailing of the citizen in the conventional mode of I and You. Here, then, is

an ordinary man, whose back faces the camera, thereby cutting an essen-

tially defiant mode. The fleeing uniformed figure is also seen from behind.

Both characters, framed this way, become archetypes in the same manner

as Kasu Mia, with his generic last name and elusive ancestry. The kicker

and the soldier are not individual citizens, but instead are tokens of types

locked in a contentious relationship that was born almost with the nation

itself. With minor exceptions, the 15-year military rule ended with the cul-

mination of the democracy movement that ousted the retired lieutenant-

general Ershad as president in 1990 (Schendel 2009).

The civilian in the censored photo, in the dominant role of the aggres-

sor vis-à-vis the uniformed man, is not the citizen to be identified by a

state document. Instead, the faceless and hence anonymous man is an

element of a crowd—disorderly, amorphous, and predictably destructive.

Observed closely, one can see more people in the photo, possibly stu-

dents, shopkeepers, or passers-by on the other side of the street, running

away from the scene of crime while looking back at it. From Ahmed’s foot-

notes, one gathers that the other photos of this event found in the press

and in the military’s own publications showed the university students with

sticks (lathi) in hand, thus making themselves constitutive elements of a

violent crowd. “Arms that are supposed to carry books and pens are car-

rying sticks,” said one of the photo captions in the newsletter published

by the military. The assertion reveals the official desire to read these ac-

tions as perpetrated by masses who are either not students or, better yet,

should not be treated as such by the state because of their actions that

mimic those of a criminal crowd.4 It is the censored image that captures

the potentiality of the violent contact. It freezes the moment when a civil-

ian is more powerful and succeeds in attacking its target and possibly

hurting it. The notorious mid-air kick hints at near-certain bodily contact

within an instant of the camera’s click, evoking therefore an “anticipatory

nostalgia” in the viewer, a suggestion that cries out actual humiliation

as opposed to the possibility of an assault of a charging, lathi-armoured

crowd (cf. Morris 2009).

This photograph is dangerous not simply because it offers a glimpse into

a moment when a menacing crowd is being formed; the latter, if anything,


1272

is a permanent fixture in everyday political performances in Bangladesh,

and South Asia more broadly (Gandhi and Hoel 2012), a history of which is

lodged in the nationalist and other struggles of the last century (Chakrabarty

2007). The photo is considered harmful because it depicts the realization of

a potentiality that is generally attributed to crowds. Its danger lies in captur-

ing what the crowd is feared for, but is rarely seen to do; in this case, physi-

cally assault a seemingly omnipotent military, or “the sovereign” (Azoulay

2008, Hobbes 1982). Its drama is also heightened due to the viewer’s in-

ability to put a face to this figure of disobedience, in spite of the vision—

however fleeting—of direct and popular sovereignty that it creates. It would

be misleading, though, to take the projected anonymity of the kicker too

literally, or to celebrate the power of his defiance tout court. Indeed, a de-

fense and intelligence report exclusive to the subscribers of Bangladesh

Military Forces (BMF), which conducts research on national security, was

titled, “The ‘Flying Kicker’ Identified” (Ahmed 2008). The title bespeaks an

acknowledgment of the official effort as well as the difficulty in naming the

aggressor. In this little drama of sovereignty and transparency, the army

admits to overcoming the photograph’s resistance to identification, albeit

before a restricted public.

That none of the parties involved in the production of a photographic

image—the photographer or the represented object—can seal off a pho-

to’s effects or determine its meanings is by now commonsensical. In their

astute theoretical ruminations around sense, temporality, and intimacy

in the taking and viewing of photos, scholars have analyzed the sense

of immediacy or truth value conventionally associated with the medium

(Baer 2002, Barthes 1981, Benjamin 1977). Philosophical work has paved

the way for anthropology to critically approach the fetish of photogra-

phy’s power, the supposed eloquence of the viewed over that of the read.

Anthropologists have added to the literature rich and culturally-situated

evidence of photography’s occult powers in places where it has acted

more than as a mere vector of representation. Photography has long been

a mediating technology of colonial power itself, facilitating both the vio-

lence and the benevolence that marked its documentary and governing

practices (Morris 2009, Pinney 2011).

Ariella Azoulay (2008) has found profound analogies between the con-

cept of citizenship and the medium of photography. In theorizing what she

calls the civil contract of photography, Azoulay approaches citizens primar-

ily as those who are governed. Through various ideological mechanisms,

NUSRAT S. CHOWDHURY

1273

the nation-state forges a bond of identification between citizens and the

state. It does so, as in ideological moves of any kind, by successfully eras-

ing this fact. As photography becomes a more accessible medium of ex-

pression for those who produce and consume a global visual culture, the

parties involved in the photographic act are not mediated through a sov-

ereign power and are not limited to the bounds of a nation-state or an

economic contract. “The users of photography,” Azoulay argues, “thus re-

emerge as people who are not totally identified with the power that governs

them and who have new means to look at and show its deeds” (2008:24).

Similar to citizenship that is also gained through recognition, photography,

as the sovereign must acknowledge, cannot be simply possessed; hence,

the desire to put an end to its circulation. Here, then, is one clue as to the

need to censor this particular image. This is also one of the main points

of Rahnuma Ahmed’s essay in which she gestures at a what I read as a

vaguely Foucauldian theory of censorship in which the authoritarian re-

gime, unbeknownst to itself, generates rather than represses the possibili-

ties of bringing the censored image into public visibility.

What is equally fascinating about the photo is its ability to speak to

the fear of the crowd and its supposed immanent potentialities. William

Mazzarella (2010) has argued that canonical writing on crowds, from

works by Gustave Le Bon and Elias Canetti to Sigmund Freud and Ortega

y Gasset, at face value, seems hopelessly politically incorrect. Crowds—if

one were to offer a laundry list of sorts—are perpetually dangerous be-

cause they contain the danger of violent eruptions. Members of crowds

are irresponsible and immature and do not deserve all the privileges of ma-

ture citizenship. And despite the creative energies identified in them, they

are ultimately the rabble that has to be kept from the gates. The crowds,

in short, are the intimate enemy of constituted authority. They are the dark

matter that pulls on the liberal subject from its past.

Mazzarella’s argument also serves as a point of departure for thinking

anew the social potential of group energies. For him, to re-stage the op-

position between crowds and their more recent progressive incarnations,

such as multitudes, premised as it is on a theory of an autonomous lib-

eral subject and the multitude’s supposed attachment to immanent and

unmediated potentiality, is to “reproduce a misleading epochal distinc-

tion between past and present phases of modernity” (2010:698, emphasis

added). I argue, and hope to have already shown through the examples of

Muhammad Yunus’s letters and Kasu Mia’s ID card, that a certain sense


1274

of epochal distinction was very much at work in Bangladesh during the

political period that is the subject and the backdrop of this discussion. The

crowd as a force of politics was the intimate enemy of the military regime’s

agenda of effective and depoliticized governance.

One could possibly object to a reading of a photo that features a single

man in violent exchange with an individual member of the military as a clas-

sic representation of a crowd. It is, however, not difficult to read the action

caught on camera as a metonym for a crowd that is by definition amor-

phous, faceless, and brimming with uncontainable libidinal energies that

are impossible to sublimate, to echo Freud (1975) on group psychology.

Writing on the power of a baiting crowd, Elias Canetti observes, “The victim

can do nothing to [the baiting crowd]. He is either bound or in flight, and

cannot hit back; in his defenselessness he is victim only” (1984:49). Indeed,

even the fact that charges were brought against the professors on the basis

of their instigation of the student mobilizations (though the students pro-

testing were not necessarily from the same universities or even the same

cities), and of leading the masses into breaking Emergency laws, points to

another definitional characteristic of crowd: incapable of thinking for them-

selves, or thinking at all, the crowd finds in the leader an ego ideal. The ban

on the image and the charges against the teachers and their students bring

the point home. The crowd in this context is more than politically incorrect;

it is criminal. The “un-identifiable” man in the photo defies the recognition

that remains the premise of both photography and citizenship. This defi-

ance is also an essential quality of the crowd.

It is worthwhile to revisit Le Bon’s thought on crowds as this essay

comes to an end. If anything, the status of this photograph in the political

context of its circulation makes apparent that it is not only the governed

that thinks in images, or “in its flesh,” as Ortega y Gasset said of the mass

man (1932). Censoring the photo of the military’s humiliation shows that

the sovereign, as the epitome of reason, more often than not participates

in the kind of picture-thinking of which it routinely accuses its subjects.

And I do not only mean this literally. The unreasonableness with which

the sovereign approaches citizens and crowds, including their various

mediatized representations, shatters the fetishized boundaries between

reason and affect.

The irrationality of picture-thinking as opposed to the reasoned actions

of an enlightened, autonomous subject is a fiction, but it is an ideological

ruse that has been closely entwined with the making of the contemporary

NUSRAT S. CHOWDHURY

1275

political reality in Bangladesh. The ruse is constitutive because the sover-

eign must excise its own irrationality by projecting it onto the past, and onto

the crowd that is supposed to belong to an earlier stage of political matu-

rity.5 This purported retardation of citizenly maturation, as reflected in the

ID card and the photograph, is typical of crowds. It is the picture-thinking

aspect of its character that is ideally absent in the citizen hailed by Yunus’s

letters. Their specific pronominal usage of I and you turns each reader into

an intimate addressee and performatively brings a citizen into being. The

latter has been hitherto absent in the national political scene known to lean

more on street violence and backhanded deals than deliberations in the

public sphere. Choosing the singular over the plural and the second person

over the first, the letters mark a distinct shift in envisioning politics that pur-

ports to signal a radical break with the past. A sense of epochal distinction,

crafted most energetically during the Emergency, was bred by an effort at

violent excision, which makes up what I have described here as the classic

impasse of sovereignty and citizenship in the postcolony. n

A c k n o w l e d g m e n t s :

I would like to thank Joseph Masco, William Mazzarella, Rihan Yeh, and Shefali Jha for their careful com-ments on various iterations of this article. It has benefited from the feedback from participants in the 2009 Annual South Asia Conference in Madison, the Human Rights Workshop and the South Asia Graduate Students Conference VII at the University of Chicago, and the 2012 political theory conference at Cornell University. I want to express my gratitude to Khaled Sarkar (Senior Photojournalist, The Daily Prothom

Alo) and Nasrin Siraj Annie for allowing me to reproduce the photograph and the Facebook image, respectively. Thanks also to the two anonymous reviewers for Anthropological Quarterly. The Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation and the Committee on Southern Asian Studies at the University of Chicago have supported the write-up of the dissertation of which this article has been a part. I am grateful to both institutions.

E n d n o t e s :

1I do not mean to suggest that a clearer picture would solve the problem of recognition. While I proceed to show how the ID card in question raises theoretical concerns about state initiatives in identification, the argument about the distorted photos, including the reactions to them, indicates that the middle-class citi-zen writing in the newspaper is particularly frustrated by the inability of the photograph to properly identify him. I believe that the “irritation” that he experiences needs to be taken seriously in order to understand the emotional investments certain kinds of citizens have in various state projects of identification.

2Although my analysis here is restricted to reactions on social media, I see the comments here as repre-sentative of the discussions, dissatisfactions, and humor that revolved around the freshly minted ID cards during fieldwork, which coincided with the state of emergency. However, an exploration of this kind would have benefitted much from a more detailed ethnography of state documents as material objects similar to Hull’s (2012) work on bureaucracy in urban Pakistan.

3For a discussion of the state as the sublime, see Thomas Hansen’s (2001) Wages of Violence: Naming

Identity in Post-colonial Bombay.

4The Bangladesh army’s proclamation is uncannily resonant with Jawaharlal Nehru’s speeches on politics and development in newly independent India. Theorizing the uniqueness of South Asian post-colonial


1276

sovereignty, Dipesh Chakrabarty reminds us that Nehru was not against students taking an interest in political matters. Such interest was part of the process that would make them into citizens. However, he adds, “[The students’] actions were reminiscent of the anti-British nationalist movement of the pre-inde-pendence period…It was somehow acceptable when students of a country under foreign rule resorted to them. But they were ‘not the sign of a free nation’” (Chakrabarty 2007:3293-3294). This view on the appropriateness of student agitations is echoed in Bangladesh as well where a possible ban on student politics keeps resurfacing as a topic of deliberation every now and then in the face of political disorder. And yet, similar to the argument about the efficacy of breaking laws under colonial rule in Nehru’s vision, the role of violent student politics in some of the landmark events in Bangladesh’s history, such as the Language Movement of 1952 or the 1971 Liberation War is justified, and, in fact, celebrated in popular culture and nationalist histories.

5There is a parallel here between the writings about crowds and the multitudes that Mazzarella (2010) has labeled as their “negative intimacy.” A theory of multitudes needs the figure of the crowd as its abjected other.

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F o r e i g n L a n g u a g e Tr a n s l a t i o n s :

“Picture-Thinking”: Sovereignty and Citizenship in Bangladesh [Keywords: Citizenship, crowds, political emergency, democracy, visual culture, Bangladesh, South Asia]

ছবির মত চিন্তাঃ বাংলাদেশে সার্বভৌমত্ব ও নাগরিকত্বের রাজনীতি সূত্রশব্দঃ নাগরিকত্ব, ভী়/জটলা, জরুরী অবস্থা, গণতন্ত্র, দেখার সংস্কৃতি, বাংলাদেশ,দক্ষিন এশিয়া

“图像－思考”：论班达亚齐的主权与公民权 [关键词：公民权，群众，政治事变，民主，视觉文化，班达亚齐，南亚]

“Pensamento-Imagem”: Soberania e Cidadania no Bangladesh [Palavras-chave: Cidadania, multidões, emergência política, democracia, cultura visual, Bangladesh, Sul da Ásia]

«Картиномышление»: Суверенность и гражданство в Бангладеше.

[Ключевые слова: гражданство, толпы, политическое ЧП, демократия, визуальная культура,

Бангладеш, южная Азия]

” صورة التفكر ”: السيادة وامواطنة ي بنغاديش

الكلات الدالّة امواطنة، الجاهر، حاات الطوارئ السياسية، الدموقراطية، الثقافة البرية، بنغاديش، جنوب آسيا

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